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Starbucks: Buy Your Lattes With Bitcoin Instead

Major retailer and high street operator Starbucks has collaborated with Microsoft to let you get your morning pickup with Bitcoin instead of cash.

Starbucks and Microsoft are two of the big name companies joining up with newly formed Bakkt. Bakkt is a new company from the Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange. It’s aim is to create a trading platform letting it’s users exchange various popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin into fiat. Bakkt will be powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, as stated in their press release on ‘bizjournals’.

Starbucks currently has over 13,000 stores currently in operation in the U.S.A so this collaboration is nothing to look over, and is potentially a huge step for Bitcoin adoption across the country and potentially globally. Starbucks Payments VP Maria Smith released a statement saying the following:

“As the flagship retailer, Starbucks will play a pivotal role in developing practical, trusted and regulated applications for consumers to convert their digital assets into US dollars for use at Starbucks,“

Further on, she said

“As a leader in Mobile Pay to our more than 15 million Starbucks Rewards members, Starbucks is committed to innovation for expanding”

Bakkt has plans to launch its service in November and with it’s big-name backers and owners it should hopefully be a big push for Bitcoin’s mainstream e-commerce adoption across the United States, although its important to clarify that Starbucks themselves would not be accepting Bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies in general, directly. Instead, users would convert their Bitcoin through Bakkt into a fiat currency, which is then used in turn to pay at a merchant.

It doesn't seem unreasonable that in the future we could expect a global push for Starbucks to adopt this internationally - opening up a total of 27,000 stores that consumers can use to potentially pay with Bitcoin.